Resource Mapping and Monitoring

The USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection initiative aims to identify where the landscape is changing and why.

Many factors determine how human beings modify the earth's landscape. Land-cover change is inherently a local event, yet broader scale socioeconomic and biophysical factors also affect how humans make decisions to use the landscape. Projecting future land cover requires modelers to account for driving forces of land-cover change operating at scales from local ("bottom-up") to global ("top-down")...

Evapotranspiration (ET) rates – the combination of evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants – are powerful tools in the management of scarce water resources.Taken alone, however, those rates leave unanswered questions about water sources, questions that can offer guidance and insight on challenging decisions in areas reliant on irrigation.Researchers at EROS work to offer that insight...

A planet with a changing climate and growing population forces tough decisions about the use of limited resources.Making sustainable choices in the face of global change requires an accurate cataloging of those resources. Since 1991, EROS has been the North American node for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Resource Information Database (UNEP-GRID), which tracks environmental...

Satellite data archived at EROS serves a critical role in the assessment of food security for FEWS NET – the Famine Early Warning System Network.

A planet with limited water resources needs accurate, reliable and frequently-updated tools to measure water use and plan for future needs. Scientists at EROS harness the remote sensing capabilities of satellite data to offer powerful tools that resource managers across the United States can use to gain insight into the water use needs of agricultural land, forests, and public green spaces.

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center National Land Cover Database team in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has produced the most comprehensive remote-sensing based quantification of western United States shrublands to date.

Wetlands purify and store our water, process carbon and nutrients and serve a crucial role in the life cycle of a wide range of flora and fauna. Wetland disturbance from urban development or agriculture can alter the natural flow of runoff and increase the risk for flooding.

Landscapes of West Africa: A Window on a Changing World is an atlas and unique dataset that uses time-series satellite image data and field-based photography to tell the story of wide-ranging land change across 17 countries. EROS scientists selected the years 1975, 2000 and 2013 to characterize the landscapes and create the product, which represents the broadest effort to map the region in history...

Scientists at EROS look at local and global drivers of land-use change to project how different scenarios will impact and change landscapes. Using the FOREcasting SCEnarios of Land-use Change (FORE-SCE) modeling framework provides spatially explicit projections of future land-use and land-cover change.

The Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) and Applications project at EROS offers information used for a range of applications analysis needed for climate change analysis.